Pentecost Sunday, 2025: … each one heard them speaking in their own language. (Acts 2:6)
I am ending my extended time in the US at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, in the company of Fr. William, my predecessor and current acting executive director of the American branch of MID, and two other members of the Board, Fr. Michael Peterson, OSB and Fr. Lawrence, OCSO. Several others joined us online as well from around the country. It was a fitting way to end this particular sojourn since it was exactly a year ago that I was here giving the monastic community their retreat when Fr. William asked me if I would be willing to step in as his successor. And the rest of is history, ongoing history…
Of course, a good part of this trip was to both spend some time with my home community in Big Sur, which I did over Holy Week and the Easter Octave, and with my beloved family, besides taking care of medical appointments and other official business. I also had several commitments that blended easily into my role of promoting and engaging in interreligious dialogue.
The work portion of the trip began with a weekend retreat at the Jesuit Retreat House in Los Altos, CA in late April. I have been a frequent guest there over the years, but this was the first time I offered something for their retreat program. It was on one of my favorite topics––integral spirituality, and it confirmed what I have been saying all along, that almost everything I do flows in and out of dialogue since I almost always teach from the perspective of what Bede Griffiths called Universal Wisdom, what we share with other spiritual traditions. And it was confirmed once again just how many people there are who have a kind of dual belonging, heavily influenced particularly by one of the traditions of Asia, both philosophically (whether they know it or not) and in terms of practice. This is something I am trying to bring to the forefront in the work of DIMMID, that we can also serve as a bridge for our own co-religionists, we who have seriously studied and engaged with those other traditions. This would be a valuable ministry in and for the Church.
I also had three events in my “old turf,” Santa Cruz, CA, where this work began for me two decades ago. In 2005 I founded an interreligious group for study and practice there called Sangha Shantivanam (after our ashram in India), and that group is still going without me, now celebrating 20 years. Our sangha had been instrumental in a movement called The Tent of Abraham which brought together Jews, Christians, and Muslims for shared prayer and fellowship. It had been in hiatus for some years, but, using my visit as an excuse, it was reconvened now simply using the name “The Tent,” because other traditions were also involved, particularly our Buddhist friends who are very active in that city. I gave a talk entitled “Let Us Come to A Common Word,” that centered around Nostra Aetate. The opening benediction was offered by a local rabbi and then a Buddhist teacher formed in the Tibetan tradition led us in a metta meditation, as dedication of merit.
The next night I performed a concert, which again featured songs from various traditions as well as some new liturgical pieces. But earlier in the day I also had the chance to visit Redwood Vihara. It is a small community in the Chinese Ch’an Buddhist tradition founded from the Land of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah, CA. There are currently two young monks living there. Their main teacher is our long-time friend Rev Heng Sure who, though now stationed on the Gold Coast of Australia, happened to also be in California at the time, so we had a glorious reunion. I had met the two young monks, Jin Chuan and Jin Wei, online with Heng Sure back in the fall when we were discussing some music issues they are working on, so we kind of knew each other. I was staying at Villa Maria Del Mar retreat house in Santa Cruz and the two drove down to pick me up. We started talking the moment they arrived and talked non-stop for the next five hours except for a brief meditation time together. They brought me up to the vihara, where Heng Sure and another luminous soul were awaiting our arrival, Nipun Mehta, who founded and runs an amazing creative initiative called Service Space. I cannot begin to describe it: check it out here: https://www.servicespace.org. Nipun is from Gurjarat originally but works out of Santa Cruz now. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned my friend and member of my Peace Council advisory board, the pandit from Rishikesh, Siddhartha Krishna, and to my surprise Nipun said, “Oh yes, I know him well.” The world gets smaller and smaller––and more and more beautiful.
The next day, my third event for the time in Santa Cruz was a retreat day just with members of the Sangha celebrating our anniversary.
The next week brought me to Albuquerque where I was a guest of Richard Rohr’s Center for Contemplation and Action. Fr. Richard is an old friend by now from his time at the Hermitage and my time on retreat with him in 1998, and I have also gotten to know some of the “millennials,” as he calls them, who now run the center. I gave a presentation in person and online for the staff of CAC the first morning and then had a series of meetings, mainly with Michael Poffenberger, the executive director, and Paul Swanson and Mike Petrow, who are responsible for faculty of the very successful Living School and content for its formation program. I was pretty tired at the end of my three days but that was only because there was simply one stimulating conversation after another. They are hoping that we can collaborate, with DIMMID as an organization or with me personally. I also got to spend quality time with Richard himself, one long morning visit and a dinner that evening. He has survived five bouts of cancer and is still full of life and whimsy, though he has been weakened by the ordeal, which he acknowledges gracefully and humbly.
My last big commitment was a retreat at the beautiful Redemptorist Renewal Center in an area of Tucson called Painted Rock, surrounded by cacti and petroglyphs and the vast desert sky. The retreat was organized by my close friend the well-known musician Tom Booth and was attended for the most part by people I have known for decades, some over 40 years now, seasoned mature people of faith. It was the first time I had presented this material to anyone, sharing with them what I have learned about meditation and contemplative prayer from the exploration of other spiritual traditions and how that has affected my understanding of God––my practice and my Credo, you might say. I was a little nervous going into it, afraid that this material would have been too foreign to them, but I need not have been. They were very attentive and receptive, and we had an earth-shaking weekend together, praying and meditating, stretching and breathing, and engaging in very profound discussions.
And now I wind up where it all started, here with the welcoming community at St. Johns’s. The board members and I have had good discussions about how to revive the work of MID in America, a similar discussion that I have had and will be having with other directors around the world in the coming months. I feel as if we need to remind people that, just as Vatican II was not a passing fad, so the work of interreligious dialogue is going to be an ongoing perennial ministry in the church and the world. Even if it’s hard to build up steam again post-Covid (and with our aging communities sometimes being in survival mode), we monks still have a mandate from the Vatican to take a leading role in interreligious dialogue. As Cardinal Pignedoli said back in 1974, “The presence of monasticism in the Catholic Church is in itself a bridge spanning all religions. If we were to present ourselves to Buddhism and Hinduism, not to mention other religions, without the monastic religious experience, we would hardly be credible as religious persons.”
The key words that have stayed on my mind these weeks are the two verbs used to describe my role: to promote and engage in interreligious dialogue. I see the first, promote, as intrareligious, that is, within our own tradition, especially within monasticism, proselytizing about the ongoing importance of dialogue; whereas engage is extra-ecclesial, going to folks outside of our tradition, hopefully on their turf, an activity that I find stimulating and refreshing––and vitally important. I do think that two months is too long to be away from home base, but I am also very grateful for the encounters I have had and the work I get to do. I’m anxious to get home to Pope Leo’s Rome and see if there is any change in the general feel of the city. More than anything I can’t wait to be in my own room again. This time it feels like a more permanent move to Italy.
I ended up my American tour last night joining Bro. John Hansen for his regular Sunday night gig, playing music at a sandwich shop in nearby St Cloud. John is one of the finest guitarists I know, mainly in classical and jazz repertoire, but has given himself over to performing acoustic folk and standards these last years. He is joined by a fine jazz guitarist named Russell and I had a blast sitting in with my SG mini Taylor. A fine way to end my trip.
